New York Times and Wall Street Journal say they are under attack from China

Nikhil Kumar

Nikhil Kumar is The Independent's New York correspondent. He was formerly assistant editor on the foreign desk and has also done a variety of jobs on the city desk, where he wrote about markets, commodities and other business and economics topics.

There are growing fears about Chinese cyber attacks on Western media outlets after two of America's largest newspapers said Chinese hackers had infiltrated their computer systems.

Hours after The New York Times (NYT) said Chinese hackers had
targeted its computer network over the last four months, The Wall
Street Journal (WSJ), owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation,
said it too had been the subject of similar attacks.

A statement from Dow Jones & Co, also owned by News
Corporation, said: "Evidence shows that infiltration efforts target
the monitoring of the Journal's coverage of China." It added that
hacking attacks "related to coverage of China is an ongoing
issue".

Earlier, the NYT said it had faced repeated hacking attacks as
it prepared a story tracing the hidden riches of the family of Wen
Jiabao, the country's premier.

The revelations came just weeks after Chinese authorities forced
a NYT reporter to leave the country. Two months after the paper's
Shanghai bureau chief David Barboza authored the account of the
billions amassed by Mr Wen's relatives, Beijing refused to renew a
visa for his colleague Chris Buckley.

In a story on its website, the paper said that as Mr Barboza was
working on the piece, hackers had broken into its systems and
cracked passwords for every employee. They broke into the email
accounts of Mr Barboza and the paper's India-based South Asia
bureau chief, Jim Yardley, who has previously reported from
Beijing.

"Security experts hired by The [New York] Times to detect and
block the computer attacks gathered digital evidence that Chinese
hackers, using methods that some consultants have associated with
the Chinese military in the past, breached The Times' network," the
paper said.

Last year, hackers who according to past diplomatic cables
released by WikiLeaks were linked to the Chinese military,
infiltrated European Union computers, accessing the emails of
Herman Van Rompuy, the President of the European Council, according
to the Bloomberg news agency.

The attacks on the NYT first came to light when the story on the
Wen family's finances, which used public records to estimate that
the premier's relatives "have controlled assets worth at least
$2.7bn", was published on 25 October. Warned of "consequences" for
its investigation, the paper asked AT&T, the telecoms firm
which monitors its computer network, to keep an eye out for unusual
activity. AT&T detected hacking activity the day the article
went up on the NYT website.

China has denied any role in the hacking, with the country's
Ministry of National Defence telling the NYT that its laws
prohibited "any action including hacking that damages internet
security".